Shuffle Kafuffle

I got me an iPod Shuffle about five months ago and up until early last week I was loving it. It is small, convenient, and makes yard work, commuting, and walking the dogs a little more interesting. However last Monday my shuffle decided to die on me. It started showing signs of the infamous orange and green flash of death problem. Basically, the shuffle wasn’t recognized by either my Mac or Windows machine and when I tried to play it, the front orange and green lights would flash. I scoured the internet and found much talk and manyproposedsolutions, but nothing seemed to work. All the help on the Apple site didn’t seem to help either.

At that point I started looking into geting the shuffle repaired or replaced. It has only been five months since I bought so I was hoping the exchange/repair would be free. There is no Apple store here in Calgary so I went online and started to make a service request. Unfortunately my shuffle’s serial number was not recognized, so at this point, a little frustrated I called up Apple’s support line and waited. Only a short time passed before an Apple rep came on the line and helped me properly register my shuffle (which apparently I had screwed up last time) and got me on my way. I then went back online and continued to schedule my service. Although the cost of the replacement did turn out to be $0, they still wanted my credit card (in order to charge me for my replacement if I didn’t send back my busted shuffle) but when the credit card submission timed out, I was back on the phone to Apple support. Again, just a short wait and another helpful Apple rep helped me out and my service was scheduled.

Long story short, 48 hours I had a new shuffle and my old dead one was back in the pre-paid package ready to be picked up for the return to Apple and the huge shuffle graveyard I’m sure they have somewhere. All in all, I was really happy with the whole replacement process. Mind you, I would have rather the shuffle not explode in the first place, but if it had to happen, I’m glad the replacement was as seamless as one can reasonably expect these days.

Editor’s Note: Kafuffle is one of those words I don’t think I’ve ever written down in the past, but I’ve used quite a bit in speech. Weird.

This was written by Tim. Posted on Monday, August 7, 2006, at 12:33 pm. Filed under Tech. Tagged Mac, OSX. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.